Departmental Legal Costs

Pete Wishart: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what expenditure his Department and its agencies have incurred on external legal advice and representation in each year since his Department was established; and for what purposes such services have been commissioned.

Dan Norris: The expenditure the Department and its agencies have incurred on external legal advice and representation in each financial year since the Department was established is as follows:
	
		
			   £000 
			 2002-03 3,737 
			 2003-04 2,955 
			 2004-05 4,898 
			 2005-06 4,374 
			 2006-07 1,858 
			 2007-08 4,770 
			 2008-09 4,061 
		
	
	External legal advice and representation was commissioned for a range of specialist legal services that were not available internally.
	In reply to a question from the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), on 8 June 2007,  Official Report, column 1429W, asking how much was spent on legal fees in each of the previous five years, 2002-03 to 2006-07, an answer was published which gave lower figures for those years than the figures above.
	The reason is that one of the Department's executive agencies (the Rural Payments Agency) has revised its figures for 2002-03 to 2006-07 to include expenditure on legal services by non-legal divisions within the RPA that had been omitted from the answer referred to above.

Re-registration: Overseas Voters

Philip Dunne: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will assess the merits of ending the requirement on overseas voters to re-register every year.

Michael Wills: Overseas voters are subject to the same requirements as those in the UK. They are required each year to confirm where they are resident and ensure that relevant election documents are despatched to the correct address whenever an election is held. Changing that requirement could damage the integrity of the electoral register.